


Symptomatology

by GhostoftheMotif



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Coffee Shops, Dating, Frenemies, Friendship, Hospitals, Multi, Snark
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-20
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 15:24:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GhostoftheMotif/pseuds/GhostoftheMotif
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean has a plan for his life. Eren messes with it. [College AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Symptomatology

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vorpal_platypus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vorpal_platypus/gifts).



Jean never had a lot of cash on hand, but he did have a bit put away. His parents planned ahead for tuition when he was only a few months old, which he was glad for, because it only took a few years for them to forget about that kind of thing. Life got distracting for them, and Jean, five years old and loud but not particularly articulate, couldn’t find the right words to hold their attention. His parents thought in lists and charts, and Jean’s needs became impersonal checkboxes in the back of a mental file. Sometimes those needs were met, and sometimes they weren’t. It depended on how much energy was left over after his mom’s job and his dad’s friends.

At first, Jean tried to organize his mind in the same way. He tried to pick up the checkboxes they missed.

He figured out pretty early on that it didn’t work that way, and neither did he. Picking things apart and prioritizing them came naturally, but he didn’t have the meticulousness that his parents did. He backhandedly scorched through what he wanted, either branding it on his life or turning it to ash, and somewhere along the line he lost the patience to ensure one or the other. Jean got tired. He was tired by the age of ten, exhausted by fifteen, and by eighteen, he was just done.

Law school or med school--- those were the options his parents kept dangling in front of his face, seeming to think that the money for it would spring from the ether. Regardless, they had a checkbox that said ‘my son is a doctor/lawyer’, and he was mostly certain that their continued presence in his life was contingent on that checkbox being filled.

Med school didn’t inspire negative or positive feelings in him, but law school was actively unappealing, so he went with the former. Money was still an issue, and he didn’t want to eat through the chunk his parents had set aside for baby not-a-disappointment Jean. That was why, rather than focusing himself straight at becoming a doctor, he became a paramedic first.

It had made sense to him at the time: get some medical background and bring in some money before slogging, wide-eyed with shot nerves, through med school like the poor bastards who could only stare in numb confusion when their friends offered them a non-caffeinated beverage.

It would be easy, he told himself.

As tired as he was, he figured he should fight it out while he still had the ability to. This was a good first volley. The sooner he kicked school to the curb, the sooner he could live a comfortable life.

Then he pulled a fourteen year old girl with a flail chest from a mangled car, and Jean’s shock and crippling self-doubt almost killed her.

\---

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Jean told his cappuccino and also the person sitting across from him. Subconsciously, he’d made sure to sit so that the sun was in his friend’s face. He didn’t like it when people could concentrate on his expression, especially not when he was feeling like he was right then--- namely, feeling anything at all.

Marco gave him that soft, concerned look that Jean knew was going to win the tiny hearts of the students Marco hoped to one day teach. Goddamn, Jean needed to get a friend that wasn’t so freaking understanding; it made him feel young, and that was not what he needed. “Walk me through what happened?” It sounded like a question; Marco always did that, like he never wanted to impose in a serious conversation.

Jean slouched back in his chair, tapped out a beat on the table in frustration. “I don’t know. Just.” He hissed out a breath between his teeth.

Perfectly patient, Marco sipped at his cup and waited.

After several grimaced misfires, Jean managed to grit out, “I thought I knew what I was getting into. I went through the classes, I shadowed paramedics, I saw a lot of rough… well. It wasn’t like I didn’t know it was going to be violent, you know?”

“You’re going to break that glass,” Marco interjected mildly.

Jean loosened his bruising grip and continued, looking out the floor-to-ceiling window. “There was just a safety net before. It was never… It was never just me.”

“It wasn’t _just you_ this time, either,” Marco pointed out, tone careful. “You were with a team. They know you’re a new graduate. From what you’ve told me about them, they’re the sort of people who will have your back.”

Jean’s grip tightened again; the handle made a sad sound. From behind the coffee shop’s counter, Armin glanced over to them worriedly, having developed a sixth sense where his grandfather’s dishes and Jean were concerned. “And what about when there are more than two people injured? What about when my team _can’t fucking afford_ to be looking over my shoulder?”

“Do you…” Marco trailed off, apparently unsure of himself, before he made it through the rest of what he had to say. “Do you like what you’re doing?”

Jean went very still.

“Because you’ve never told me that. I’ve never heard you say it, and I, um. I just wonder, if maybe this is more to do with your parents and that _comfortable life_ you’re always talking about than, than you.”

It was like someone had doused him in cold water.

And then Jean got mad; not at Marco, not at himself. Just. Mad.

An untidy mess of facts collided with each other and tried to fit in the same space in Jean’s head: the first time he’d felt a pulse disappear and made it come back again, the first time a little old lady had gripped his hand in the back of an ambulance and he’d found a smile for her even though he rarely could for anyone else, the first time he’d seen a doctor cut into someone’s throat and make them breathe, the first time he’d gotten someone else’s blood and bile on his clothes, the first time he’d called to try and tell his parents about those first times and they’d forgotten he was on the other line.

“Fuck my parents,” Jean said from somewhere far away, shaking.

Marco blinked.

“ _Fuck_ my parents,” he repeated, louder and not particularly articulate, but the hell with them, he didn’t need to be. “Fuck them!” Dimly, he knew he was shouting. “This is what I want to do, and I’m going to be fucking awesome at it!”

There were a lot of people looking at him.

Jean took stock of where he was, how he was standing, how one hand was splayed on the table while the other had raised the coffee mug like a banner.

Armin appeared in a sudden flurry of well-meaning nervousness, pried the mug from his hands, and replaced it with a paper cup before scurrying away again with a quiet _excuse me_.

“Feel better?” Marco asked. There was a light in his eyes.

Jean sat down again, cradled his new coffee cup to his chest, and glared out the window. “Whatever.”

\---

The hospital was right up the road from Awake and Arlelt, so it was pretty easy for Jean to shuffle there after his last shift of the week to meet Marco and caffeinate himself back into a human state. It was a nice place. The coffee was good, it was an open room instead of striving for coziness and landing in claustrophobia, and Armin was the youngest generation of a family of kindhearted people.

Some of the clientele though--- some of them made Jean want to _scream_. In anger. In mad, furious, frustrated anger.

“I hate him,” Jean muttered, either to the universe at large or to Marco, he wasn’t sure.

Marco gave an exasperated sigh. “You don’t even know who he is.”

“He’s loud and he says _things_ ,” Jean pronounced darkly. His glare caught the offending brunette across the café in the crosshairs. Not for the first time in his life, he wished his eyes had a weapons feature.

“Like you?”

Jean half-turned in Marco’s direction, preoccupied with his focused seething. “What?”

Marco beamed at him. “I said to tell me more.”

“I bet he’s a poli-sci major,” Jean hypothesized. A bit of coffee escaped over the lip of his cup from where he’d been swirling it around. Distracted, he sucked it off his finger. “He’s always talking about… issues.”

“I talk about issues.” Marco ducked his head, for no obvious reason, and pushed the remnants of a brownie around his plate. “I’m an education major.”

“Yeah, but you’re not annoying.”

That got an eyebrow lift. “So, poli-sci majors are annoying?”

“Nah, Thomas is in poli-sci. He’s okay.”

Marco lifted a hand to rub at his temples; guy probably had a headache or something.

“God, he just doesn’t stop talking,” Jean groaned. “Have you noticed that? And look at Armin! He’s just sitting there, lapping it up. I thought he had better taste.”

“Maybe he and I could start a club.”

With a half-smile tugging at the corner of Jean’s mouth, he glanced at his friend. “You want another latte to go with that sass?”

A laugh burst from Marco; it was a sound Jean liked to cause. “I knew I’d get your attention eventually.” He nudged their shoulders together and handed him his empty mug. “Another latte would be great.”

Jean collected the cup and headed for the counter, considering whether or not a muffin would help to detract from the way overhearing asinine speeches had soured his day. At the very least, it would rescue Armin from the clutches of that jackass whatever-his-name-was.

When he’d first started school, Jean had visited quite a few coffee shops to try and find the right fit. Invariably, navigating a maze of tables, chairs, bags, and computer cords rendered them anathema in his head. Jean really loved Awake and Arlelt. It had sockets set into the tile floor near the tables, with plainly demarcated paths, and an appreciation of the available space that kept it from being cluttered. This was his fit. Maybe he could wear earphones to drown out talks-too-much whenever he wasn’t there to see Marco. 

Five seconds after Jean had made it to the counter, a girl he’d never seen before pushed through the storeroom’s red curtain.

Fuck, she had that look about her that said she could conquer anything that she had half a desire to, and Jean would really, _really_ not mind falling into that category, and---

She walked right past him to go sit next to the devil, who brightened and actually managed to speak at an even greater volume when he saw her.

Armin appeared behind the register, chirped a hello at him, and fixed Marco’s latte while Jean stared in abject disbelief at the small corner table that had clearly slipped into some bizarro reality set up by an unseen film crew, because it made no fucking sense.

Jean didn’t bother with the muffin. Nothing was going to salvage his day.

“It tastes different,” Marco frowned when he took a sip of his new latte.

Never looking away from the most unlikable guy in the room, possibly in the city (or the world, he didn’t like to limit people), Jean gave a noncommittal grunt.

“Oh my god,” Marco said, sounding pained. “Your random, _obsessive_ hatred has actually seeped into my latte and made it taste different!”

Jean jerked in his seat and faced Marco, hackles up. “Shut up! No, it hasn’t!”

“Oh my god, it _has_.”

“M-maybe it was Armin’s underserved hero worship! You don’t know!”

Marco’s face smoothed over as soon as the last sentence was out of Jean’s mouth, and he knew he’d been played. “I don’t know? You mean I took random bits of information and strung them together to make an opinion on something, without any actual proof or an ounce of sound reasoning?”

“Fuck. You’re wearing your Lesson Face.”

“Don’t hate somebody you know nothing about, Jean.” Marco leaned forward, touched his arm. “If you’re going to expend that much energy on a person, you should at least know their name, don’t you think?”

Jean made another noncommittal sound and managed to redirect his glare out the window.


End file.
